A hoodie-clad Mark Zuckerberg had plenty of reason for the cheesy grin he threw at the press outside the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan, where he kicked off his company’s IPO road show Monday.

Sure, many of the investors who gathered were underwhelmed by the presentation. But that probably doesn’t matter, since at least some of the people who count are on board the Facebook train.

We’re talking about Wall Street analysts, the folks big investors pay attention to when it comes to building a stock’s value.

Sterne Agee’s Arvind Bhatia initiated coverage of Facebook on Monday with a solid “buy” rating. That’s good news for a company that has come in for its share of second-guessing in recent weeks, as it gets ready for the largest-ever tech IPO, scheduled for May 18.

Bhatia is targeting a price range for Facebook stock of $46 to $59 per share within the next year and a half. That’s comfortably higher than the $28 to $35 per share range the company is looking for when it goes public on the Nasdaq exchange, selling 180 million new shares and 157 million existing insider shares.

“Just like Google did less than a decade ago, we believe Facebook is disrupting the worldwide advertising market,” Bhatia wrote.

Another analyst, Ken Sena of Evercore Partners, told the Wall Street Journal’s Alexandra Scaggs the sky’s pretty much the limit for the social network. “We believe that Facebook will redefine advertising and that the company is on course to be the most valuable media company in existence,” he said.

Not everyone is such a Facebook fan, though, and there are tough questions going forward for Zuckerberg and other top executives at the company.

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